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5-E Classroom sTEm aCTiviTy: roboTs running mazEs & making iCE CrEamDr. Candace Walkington, Assistant Professor of Mathematics EducationSouthern Methodist University

10 STEM JOBS // EARLY FALL 2014 // STEMJOBS.COM

COMPETITION // FIRST ROBOTICS

LET’S GET READY TO RUMBLE!

FINALISTS DUKE IT OUT IN THE FIRST ROBOTICS NATIONAL COMPETITION IN ST. LOUIS

There are varsity sports, and then there are sports for the mind. And you don’t have to worry about boys competing against boys, girls against girls. Sometimes freshmen can get the better part of the seniors, too. It all depends on your de-sign—and your robot.

The FIRST Robotics Competition is a just that type of high school sport. The brainchild of leg-endary inventor Dean Kamen, FIRST—For Inspi-ration and Recognition of Science and Technolo-gy—is a not-for-profit organization that inspires young people to pursue science and technology careers through a progression of four programs that offer robotics and innovation challenges. The FIRST Robotics Competition is one of the programs, and each year FIRST hosts an annu-al international championship for all four pro-grams. The recent 2014 championship helped some 67,000 high school students around the country compete in regional and national com-petitions. The high school teams, often from one school or organization and mentored by a local company, design and roll robots that shoot balls into a goal and compete against each other in what amounts to a pretty intense competition.

STEM JobsSM visited one regional event held at California University of Pennsylvania this past spring and met up with several teams vying to make it to the international championship in St. Louis. The scene inside the college basketball

arena rivaled any high school or college sporting event. Cheering crowds filled the seats. Vendors sold hot dogs. Fans held up signs. And the action on the floor was thrilling and often came down to last-second shots.

One of the teams in action was one you might not expect to see in a robotics competition. The all-girl team, Girls of Steel (GoS), has been a staple of the competition for the last few years. Dressed in flannel shirts and red and white pol-ka-dot bandanas, reminiscent of the old “Rosie the Riveter” image from the 1940s, GoS featured girls from multiple schools in Pittsburgh, Pa., who gather at Carnegie Mellon University each year to build what they hope will be a winning ro-bot. And the girls often come to the team without having any previous interest or skills in robotics.

“I had no hands-on experience in STEM fields before coming into FIRST, so this is really my first time getting into robotics,” says Naoka Gu-nawardena, who has been on the team for four years and this past year served as one of its two main leaders. “One of the cool things about FIRST is that I not only get to do design stuff, but I’m the business leader for GoS. I get to learn all of these amazing skills.”

Since she has been involved with GoS, Nao-ka has found her calling in life. She’ll attend Yale University this fall in the mechanical engineering program. “I used to want to always be an astro-

DO YOU WANT TO BUILD A ROBOT?BY LEN VERMILLION

HOW STUDENTS ARE DISCOVERING NEW CAREER PATHS THROUGH FIRST.

STEMJOBS.COM // EARLY FALL 2014 // STEM JOBS 11

Pfft... R2-D2 could take these guys.

12 STEM JOBS // EARLY FALL 2014 // STEMJOBS.COM

LET’S GET READY TO RUMBLE!

naut, but I think I’m now leaning toward doing planetary robotics,” she says.

“Working with FIRST has been in-credible,” Naoka continues. “When I started I didn’t think I’d be this into it, but when I joined I realized that this is what I love doing. This became my main extracurricular and I dedicate a lot of time to it.”

Talking over the cheering crowd in the arena during a break from prepa-ration for the next GoS match, Naoka explains just how much students get to learn from FIRST. “The design team is a really small group of girls, and we’re re-sponsible for designing a whole robot,” she says. “It was scary because getting into the nitty-gritty of the design is a big challenge, but it taught me a lot.”

For many students, their time with FIRST doesn’t end when high school ends. Even after their experience leads to career path choices, many partici-pants return as young adults to serve as mentors. Rachel Holladay is one of

those mentors. A freshman at Carnegie Mellon majoring in computer science with minor in robotics, the Louisiana native mentors GoS while at college. She also co-mentors her former team in Louisiana with her mom, Wendy, who works at NASA Stennis Space Center.

“I really feel as though I am a prod-uct of FIRST Robotics. It shaped me in a large way. It’s like a family,” she says. “The mentors who guided me had a huge impact, and I’m paying them back.

“The experience exposed me to computer science and robotics,” she continues. “It actually gave me experi-ence in robotics and the chance to dis-cover that this is what I am passionate about. This is what I want to do with my life.”

GoS finished 6th at the Pittsburgh Regional, and while the team did not qualify for the finals at the Pittsburgh Regional, it did qualify for champion-ships in St. Louis at the Buckye Region-al held March 20-22, 2014, by winning

the Engineering Inspiration Award at those events. This award “celebrates outstanding success in advancing re-spect and appreciation for engineering within a team’s school and community” and is presented to the team at a re-gional competition that best achieves this by reaching out to their schools, sponsors, other FIRST teams and their community with educational activities, robot demonstrations or presentations about their team, raising awareness of FIRST and STEM fields.

Simran Parwani and Sylvie Lee, both of GoS, won Dean’s List Finalist Awards at the Pittsburgh Regional, and Simran won one of 10 Dean’s List Awards at the championship in St. Louis.

The final in St. Louis came down to a heart-pounding conclusion in front of a roaring crowd of 20,000, when four teams from San Jose, Calif.; Bloomfield Hills, Mich.; Dallas, Texas; and Holland, Mich., won the coveted FRC® Champi-onship Winning Alliance.

NAOKA GUNAWARDENA (BOTTOM LEFT) AND THE GIRLS OF STEEL

2014 SWPA BOTSIQ COMPETITION WINNERSGrand Champion: Plum HS Still ‘N Shock 2

First Place: Plum HS Still ‘N Shock 2Second Place: Hempfield HS K.A.R.A.

Spirit Award: Punxsutawney HSBest Rookie: Freedom HS VEKA

Best Sportsmanship: Eastern Westmoreland CTC Titaniax MayhemBest Engineering Documentation: Highlands HS Notorious B.O.T.

Best Engineered Bot: Hempfield HS K.A.R.A.King of the Ring: Admiral Peary AVTS Biohazard

Coolest Bot: Punxsutawney HS SAW-3PO and Admiral Peary AVTS Biohazard

SWPA BotsIQ $500 Scholarship AwardRenee Huey - Punxsutawney HS

Joshua Worstell - Keystone Oaks HS

STEMers were going robotic as the ninth annual Southwestern Pennsyl-vania BotsIQ Competition kicked off at the California University of Penn-sylvania Convocation Center.

The two-day event invites 72 stu-dent teams from across southwest-ern Pa. against one another to battle bots. This is a great way for students to have some fun with STEM, but the even more exciting part comes from

the opportunity to learn some skills that will help them in their future ca-reers. Companies come from across the state to scope out potential STEM talent in the works.

One sophomore from Penns Man-or High School said that he learned a lot from the competition including electrical, engineering and program-ming. “It is definitely exciting and a learning experience,” he says.

BotsIQ OF SOUTHWESTERN PENNSYLVANIA

PICTURE CREDIT: MIKE ASPER

2014 SWPA BOTSIQ COMPETITORS PREP

THEIR BOT FOR BATTLE

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5-E Classroom sTEm aCTiviTy: roboTs running mazEs & making iCE CrEamHere are some ideas for how high school teachers could use this story as a launching point for integrated STEM learning. Our activities follow the 5-E Learning Cycle Model, and the activity below is intended to last two to three 1-hour class periods (although portions of the activity could be used in shorter periods).

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Ask students about what knowledge they think is needed to program robots, like the ones in the article, and how this relates to science, technology, engineering and mathematics.Bring to class a loaf of bread, peanut butter, jelly and two knives. Tell the students that you are a robot, and they need to “program” you to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.Have the students raise their hands to give you a command. You should take their commands literally (e.g., if they say “Put the peanut butter on the bread,” you should place the can of peanut butter on top of the loaf of bread).Eventually, students should determine a logical sequence of well-specified instructions that will bring you through all the steps of making the sandwich. Discuss with the students what they learned about programming a robot from this activity (e.g., it can’t think for itself, so our commands cannot be ambiguous; it is important that the order of the commands is correct; etc.)Show the class the TEDx Talks video “You Should Learn to Program”: http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/You-Should-Learn-to-Program-Chr

Part 1: EngageHave your students read the article on page 20, and then pose the following questions:

Your goal is to write a program that will allow a robotic mouse who is sitting at the start of the maze to successfully reach the end point of the maze where cheese awaits. The robotic mouse only knows 3 commands (you must place in a number for X):

a. ROTATE X: The mouse will rotate itself X radians clockwise or counter-clockwise.b. MOVE X: The mouse will move forward (if X is positive) or backward (if X is negative) X revolutions of its wheels. The mouse’s wheels have a diameter of 1 cm.c. SENSEWALL-TURN: The mouse will move forward. IF the mouse touches a wall, THEN the mouse will stop and rotate π radians.

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Divide students into groups of 3, and tell each group to draw a simple maze on 1-cm graph paper with a start and end point. Make sure they do not make mazes that are too complex as this would increase the time length of the activity. Have each group trade mazes with another group, and then give the groups the following task:

Groups must write the series of commands to give the mouse to navigate through the maze.

Students should give their finished written series of commands to the group that created the maze, and that group should test out their commands to see if they are correct. If they are not correct, the commands are returned such that the group who wrote them can debug their commands.

Part 2: Explore

1 STEMjobs.com Robots Running Mazes & Making Ice Cream

Part 3: ExplainEach student group should present their final program, describing in detail what their process was for generating it and debugging it, and what challenges they encountered.Discuss with the students whether the IF...THEN statement was useful, and what other computer-controlled systems they see in their everyday lives that might use IF…THEN logic.Ask students what other kind of logical statements they have heard about or that they think might be useful when giving commands to robots. If students do not generate it themselves, bring up AND, OR and NOT commands and give examples of each. (Refresh your own memory: http://education-portal.com/academy/lesson/boolean-logic-operators-expressions.html)

NASA is designing a robot to serve people ice cream at their Space Center in Houston, TX. Each customer must choose how many scoops of ice cream they want (NUM = 1-3), what type of ice cream they want (TYPE = 1-6), and what topping they want on their ice cream (TOP = 1-6). They can only choose one selection from each of the three menus. See the table below.

NASA would like $5 to be the base charge for the ice cream (PRICE = 5). However, they would like to program to robot to modify this price amount using IF…THEN statements of the form “IF (some condition is met) THEN (PRICE = ___).” NASA has these requests for you:

a. “We would like to reward people for making healthy decisions. We would like the machine to offer a discount to people who make an effort to choose a healthier option.b. “Some of the options involve ingredients that are more costly and more difficult to store. We would like to charge people a premium if they make these choices.”

Write a series of IF…THEN statements using AND, OR, and NOT that program the ice cream machine to satisfy these criteria. A simple example of such a statement might be “IF (NUM = 1) THEN (PRICE = 3).” This would only charge people $3 if they only got one scoop. However, your statements should also make use of AND, OR and NOT.

1 Tell students you have a new robotics design challenge for them to solve:

Part 4: Elaborate

2 STEMjobs.com Robots Running Mazes & Making Ice Cream

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Number of Scoops (NUM) Type of Ice Cream (TYPE) Topping (TOP)

1. 1 scoop 1. Chocolate 1. Gummy Bears

2. 2 scoops 2. Vanilla 2. Nuts

3. 3 scoops 3. Strawberry 3. Rainbow Sprinkles

4. Swirl Frozen Yogurt 4. Raspberries

5. Cookies n’ Cream 5. Whipped Cream

6. Peanut Butter 6. No topping

During the course of the investigation, students may realize that some combinations will have the price increased or decreased multiple times because they fall under different guidelines (both a and b above). Students will need to brainstorm how to accommodate this – one solution would be to write assignment statements like “Price = Price + 1.” In this case, it would be important to discuss with students how the equals sign is used differently in programming languages compared to in algebra. (Optional): You can show students a video of NASA’s actual ice cream robot at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LeNyc8JPbE

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Have each student write in their journal the two most complicated logical statements their group came up with for their ice cream robot. Then have students explain in their own words what the statement means in English, and how they used that statement to satisfy one of the design constraints given to them by NASA.

Part 5: Evaluate

standards:Next Gen Science Standards

HS-ETS1-2. Design a solution to a complex real-world problem by breaking it down into smaller, more manageable problems that can be solved through engineering. HS-ETS1-3. Evaluate a solution to a complex real-world problem based on prioritized criteria and trade-offs that account for a range of constraints, including cost, safety, reliability, and aesthetics as well as possible social, cultural, and environmental impacts. Common Core Mathematics Standards

CCSS.Math.Content.HSG.MG.A.3. Apply geometric methods to solve design problems.

CCSS.Math.Content.HSS.CP.A.1. Describe events as subsets of a sample space (the set of outcomes) using characteristics (or categories) of the outcomes, or as unions, intersections, or complements of other events (“or,” “and,” “not”).

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